Chapter Nine.
Voyage on a Chest continued—Find a Cask on which Nub and the Mate rest—The Raft with Walter returns—A Sword-fish caught—A Boat picked up—Washed from the Raft—Stormy Night—Two Rafts in Sight.
No two men could have conducted themselves more heroically than did the mate and Nub to save the young girl left under their charge. Neither of them allowed her to discover how weary and exhausted they felt by their prolonged and almost superhuman exertions. Now and then they stopped, and holding on with both hands to the chest, allowed their bodies to float on the water, thus obtaining some relief. The water was so warm that they did not feel any benumbing effects from being so long in it. After resting for a time, they would again strike out, Nub always commencing with a laugh and a negro song, though he seldom got further than—
“Swim away, boys, swim away;
We get to land ’fore end of day.”
Then he would cry out, “I tink I smell de flowers and de fruit already.” Mr Shobbrok spoke but little, except occasionally a word or two to cheer up Alice. She did not experience the anxieties of her older companions, for it did not, happily, enter her head that they might after all fail to reach the shore. She could not help thinking about Walter, however, and wondering how it was that the raft had run away with him. She kept her eyes ahead, looking out for the land; but though her vision was remarkably keen, she could not discover it. She thought, however, that she could distinguish, far away, the white sail of the raft; and so undoubtedly she could, but she forgot that all the time it was going further and further from them.
The mate had at first had another cause for anxiety. It was that they might be espied and followed by some of the sharks which they had seen in the neighbourhood; but as they got further away from the spot, he began to hope that they had escaped them, and that the creatures were too much occupied with the carcasses of the whale and the zygaena to follow them.
They had thus been going on for two hours or more, when Alice exclaimed, “I see something floating ahead!”
“What is it like?” asked the mate anxiously.
“It seems to me like another chest, or a cask perhaps. If you will lift your head a little out of the water, you will see it clearly.”
The mate drew himself up till his head was as high as the chest.